the stomach represents the earth element, the liver represents the fire element, the
lungs represent the gold element and the heart represents the wood element. Not that
this medicine does not work in practice. A man suffering from high blood-pressure is
considered to have too warm a "liver-fire," while a man suffering from indigestion
may be referred to as having too much earth, and a laxative is used to encourage the
function of the kidneys by way of helping the * "water element/' and the indigestion is
usually cured. If a man is suffering from nervous trouble, he should drink a lot of
water and use palliatives, so that the "kidneywater53 will go up and dampen a little of
the "liver-fire" and thus help maintain in him a more equable temper. There is no
doubt that Chinese medicine works: the quarrel is only with its diagnosis.
Here enter the survivals of savage traits in Chinese thinking. Unchecked by a
scientific method, "intuition'* has free room and often borders on a naive imagination.
Some kinds of Chinese medicine are based on a mere play of words or on some
fantastic association of thought. The toad who has a wrinkled skin is used in the cure
of skin troubles, and a peculiar kind of frog that lives in cool, deep ponds on hillsides
is supposed to have a "cooling" effect on the bodily system. For the last two years the
local papers in Shanghai have been full of advertisements of a certain "lung-shaped
plant" which is produced in Szechuen and recommended as the best cure for
tuberculosis. And this goes on in an uninterrupted series until we come to the popular
belief that a schoolboy should not eat chicken's claws lest he develop the habit of
scratching the pages of his book.
The superstitious belief in the power of words may be traced in all departments of life,
for here we are dealing neither with logic nor with common sense, but with a survival
of the savage state of mind which does not distinguish, and is not interested in
distinguishing playful fancy from serious truth. The bat and the deer are popular
motives for embroidery work because the word "bat" (fu) is a homonym for "luck"
and the word "deer" (hi) is a homonym for "official power." The Chinese bride and
bridegroom have, after the wedding ceremony, a dinner A deux consisting of a pig's
heart, because they are thus going to have "the same heart," which is the word for
"harmony."
It is difficult to say how much of it is serious belief and how much of it mere light
playful fancy. Certain taboos are evidently taken quite seriously, for the boatman will look troubled when you turn over the fish at dinner in the boat, which suggests the
"overturning" of tiie boat itself. He does not quite know whether it is true or not, but
"so people say/* and he is not interested in undertaking a research to verify it. It is a
state of mind that belongs to the borderland of truth and fiction, where truth and
fiction are pleasurably and poetically mixed, as in a dreamer's tale.
VI. IMAGINATION
This naivete we must try to understand, for it brings us to the world of the Chinese
imagination and Chinese religion. By religion, I mean a good heaven and a hot hell
and real, living spirits, and not the "kingdom . . . within you" of the Boston Unitarians,
or the belief in the impersonal and amorphous "Power in and around us, which makes
for righteousness" of Matthew Arnold.
This world of the imagination is not confined to the illiterate. Confucius himself
exhibited a certain naweti regarding the spirits when he said, "If one were to try to
please the god of the south-west corner of the house, it would be preferable to try to
please the god of the kitchen stove." He spoke of the spirits with an ease of mind
which was truly charming: "Offer sacrifices to the spirits as if the spirits were
present," and "Respect the spirits, but keep them at a distance." He was willing to let
the spirits exist if they would let him go his own way.
Han Yii, the great Confucianist of the T'ang Dynasty, continued this naive attitude. He
was officially reprimanded and compelled to go to the neighbourhood of modern
Swatow to serve as a magistrate, and when this district was suffering from an invasion
of crocodiles, he wrote a high- flown sacrificial appeal to the crocodiles. The
crocodiles seemed to appreciate his literary style (for he was one of the best writers in
China's history), and, according to his own testimony, they disappeared from the
district. It would be futile to ask if he sincerely believed in it or not. To ask that
question is completely to misunderstand the situation, for his reply would most
probably be: How can I know it is true, but how can you know it is untrue? It was an
agnosticism which openly admitted the impossibility of settling the question with o ur
mental powers, and therefore brushed it aside. Han Yii's was a powerful mind, and he
was not superstitious, for he was the man who wrote the famous essay dissuading the
Emperor from sending a delegation to bring back the "Buddha's bones55 from India. I
am sure he was half laughing when he composed that sacrificial appeal to the
crocodiles. There have been other powerful minds, more rationalistic in temperament,
like that of Ssuma Wenkung of the following dynasty, who tried to disprove the
Buddhistic hell by asking why the Chinese people never dreamed of hell until they
heard of Buddhism. But such rationalism is not typical of the Chinese mind.
To me the most characteristic creatures of the Chinese imagination are the lovely
female ghosts that the Chinese scholar spins out of his imagination, such as those told in the Strange Stories From a Chinese Studio* The stories are about the female ghosts
and spirits of wronged and disgraced women who possess the body of some
maid-servant and thus communicate their complaints to the living, and the dead
sweetheart who returns to her lover and bears him children. It is these stories with
their human touch which are most loved by the Chinese people. For the Chinese
ghosts are wonderfully human, and the female ghosts are wonderfully lovely, too:
they love and become jealous and take part in the ordinary human life.
It is not the kind of ghosts that scholars need fear when they are alone at night in their
studies. For when the lamp is burning low and the scholar has fa llen asleep, he hears
the noise of a silken dress and opens his eyes to see a demure maiden of sixteen or
seventeen, with a wistful look and a serene air, looking and smiling at him. She is
usually a passionate creature, for I have no doubt these stories a re the wish-fulfilment
of the solitary scholars. But she can bring him money and help him through poverty,
by all sorts of cunning wiles. She can nurse him through sickness with more
gentleness than an average modern nurse. What is stranger still, she will sometimes
try to save money for him, and will wait patiently for him during his months or years
of absence. She can therefore be chaste as well. The period of this cohabitation may
last a few days or weeks or it may extend to a generation until she has bo rne him
children, who, after their success ir examinations, come back for their mother and
then find thai the gorgeous mansion has disappeared and in its place is an old, old
grave, with a hole underground, where lies a dead old mother fox. For she is only one
of those fox spirits the Chinese delight to tell about. Sometimes she leaves behind a
note saying that she was sorry to leave them, but that she was a fox and only wanted
to enjoy human life, and now, since she has seen them prosper, she is grateful a nd
hopes they will forgive her. This is typical of the Chinese imagination which, without
soaring aloft to God- like heights, invests the creatures of its mind with human
passions and human sorrows. It has the pagan virtue of accepting the imaginary with
the real, and has no desire for a world perfectly rationalized and completely explained.
This quality of the Chinese imagination is so little known that I will give here a
translation of a tale, The Tale of CKienniang) handed down from the T'ang Dynasty. I
don't know whether the story is true or not, but the affair happened in the years around
A.D. 690, during the reign of the Empress Wuhou. Our novels, dramas and scholars3
works are full of this type of story, in which the supernatural is made believable
because it is made human.
i Translated by Professor H. A. Giles.
Ch' ienniang was the daughter of Mr. Chang Yi, an official in Hunan. She had a cousin
by the name of Wang Chou, who was a brilliant and handsome young man. They had
grown up together from childhood, and as her father was very fond of the young boy,
he had said that he would take Wang Chou as his son- in- law. This .promise they had
both heard, and as she was the only child, and they were very close together, their love grew from day to day. They were now grown-up young people, and even had
intimate relationships with each other. Unfortunately, her father was the only man
who failed to perceive this. One day a young official came to beg for her hand from
her father, and, ignoring or forgetting his early promise, he consented. Ch' ienniang,
torn between love and filial piety, was ready to die with grief, while the young man
was so disgusted that he decided he would go abroad rather than stay and see his
sweetheart become the bride of another person. So he made up a pretext and informed
his uncle that he had to go away to the capital. As the uncle could not persuade him to
stay, he gave him money and presents and prepared a farewell feast for him. Wang
Chou, sad to take leave of his lover, was thinking it all over while he partook of the
feast, and he told himself that it was best to go, rather than remain to carry on a
hopeless romance.
So Wang Ghou set out on a boat of an afternoon, and before he had gone a few miles
it was already dark and he told the boatman to tie up the boat along shore and rest for
the night. That night he could not sleep, and toward midnight he heard the sound of
quick footsteps approaching. In a few minutes the sound had drawn near the boat. He
got up and inquired, " Who is there at this hour of the night?" "It is I, even
Ch' ienniang," was the reply. Surprised and delighted beyond his expectations, he led
her down to the boat, and there she told him that she had hoped to be his wife, that her
father had been unfair to him, and that she could not bear parting from him. She was
afraid, too, that he, lonely and travelling in strange parts, might be driven to take his
own life. So she had braved the censure of society and the anger of her parents and
come to follow him whereever he should go. Thus they were happy together and
continued their journey to Szechuen.
Five years passed happily and she bore him two sons. But they had no news from the
family, and she was daily thinking of her parents. It was the only thing that marred
thei r happiness. She did not know whether her parents were living and well or not,
and one night she began telling Wang Chou how unhappy she was and that since she
was the only child, she felt guilty of great filial impiety to leave the old parents thus.
"This is your filial piety/5 said her husband. "I am with you in thinking this way. But
it seems that now after five years have passed, surely they are not still angry with us.
Why not go home?" Ch' ienniang was overjoyed to hear this, and so they made
preparations to go home with their two children.
When the boat had reached her home town, Wang Ghou said to Ch' ienniang, "I do not
know what state of mind your parents are in. So let me go alone first to find out.9*
His heart was palpitating as he drew near his father- in- law's house. On seeing his
father- in- law, Wang Ghou knelt down and kowtowed, and begged for forgiveness. On
hearing this, Chang Yi was greatly surprised, and said, "What are you talking about?
Ch' ienniang has been lying unconscious in bed for these last five years since you left.
She has never even left her bed." "I am not lying,'3 said Wang Ghou. "She is well and
waiting in the boat."
Chang Yi did not know what to think, so he sent two maidservants to see Ch' ienniang.
They saw her sitting, welldressed and happy, in the boat, and she even told the
servants to convey her love to her parents. Bewildered, the two maid-servants ran
home to make their report, and Chang Yi was still more greatly puzzled. Meanwhile,
she who was lying in bed in her chamber had heard of the news, and it seemed her
illness was gone, and there was light in her eyes. She rose up from her bed and
dressed herself before her mirror. Smiling and without saying a word, she came
straight to the boat. She who was in the boat was star ting for home, and they met on
the river-bank. When the two came close together, their bodies melted into one shape,
and their dresses were double, and there appeared the old Gh' ienniang, as young and
